Marianne’s Pick of the Week: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s getting to be that time of year again.  No, not Pumpkin Spice Latte season; horror season. And have I got a creepy, eerie, spine tingling (with just a touch of blood) read for you.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest, The Bewitching, is a multi-generational horror, history, and culture lesson. Spanning nearly 100 years and narrated by three different women this is gothic, slow-building horror at its best.  I like to use the metaphor of the frog in the water.  The dread Moreno-Garcia creates slowly increases until suddenly you are suddenly neck deep and burning up from the horror of the tale.

Minerva Contreras has always been drawn to the dark side.  As a child, she loved her great-grandmother Alba’s tales of terror. (Even crazier is that some of those horror stories were retellings of actual events in Nana’s life). Then as a teen she preferred staying home reading Shirley Jackson to dancing with her friends.

Now, a young woman Minerva is a graduate student writing her thesis on Beatrice Trembley, a horror novelist who published only one book in her lifetime, The Vanishing. Minerva attends the same school that Beatrice attended almost 60 years ago.

Through the generosity of one of Beatrice’s college acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, Minerva now has access to Beatrice’s journals. The papers, which tell the story of the 1934 disappearance of Virginia Somerset, are the basis for Trembley’s novel. Now in 1998, Minerva, in a surprising parallel, is also investigating the disappearance of a fellow student. She is hearing and seeing things that may or may not be there. She is experiencing many of the same unusual occurrences that Virginia lived prior to her disappearance. Eventually, we meet a horror that spans generations.

Moreno-Garcia is a master at setting scenes and slow-burn creepiness. I felt chills during Minerva’s teas with Carolyn Yates and her grandson, a fellow student. Eventually, we meet a horror that spans generations. She infuses her scenes with historical details that immerse the reader in 1908 Mexico (Nana Alba’s story), 1934 (Beatrice’s tale) and 1998 (Minerva’s narrative). And though the book is set in the summer, readers will feel those crisp autumn winds blowing.  Try this book if you are a fan of Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic or the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Isabel Canas.

Grab yourself a hot drink, get under a blanket and keep the lights on when reading this one!